Sugar High Crash
by Amarin Rose
Summary: In which Bart has too much sugar and spreads chaos instead of holiday cheer, and Tim and Kon dread the upcoming holiday party...with all its accompanying sweets.


**Sugar High Crash**

* * *

Watching as Bart zipped around the Justice Cave in his self-imposed mission to spread laughter, joy, and general holiday cheer – and only succeeding in causing mayhem and general chaos – everywhere he went, Tim turned to Kon and asked, "Bart's even more manic than usual. How much sugar has he had today, anyway?"

Kon gave a half-shrug with the arm that wasn't crammed between his chest and the back of the couch.

"Only three teaspoons," Bart answered, before he flitted off to help – more like hinder – Red Tornado hang the streamers for their Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Solstice/Winter Holiday celebration.

"In each of seven cups of triple-shot espresso," Kon countered tiredly, hauling himself up into a sitting position so Tim could sit down. He'd been using his TTK to fix each one of Bart's 'oopsies' since eight o'clock that morning.

Tim couldn't quite hold back his wince as he dropped down next to Kon. "How is it that this place is still standing?"

Kon shrugged once more. "How should I know? But I've been told by reliable sources that God looks after babies, fools, drunks…and manic speedsters." He watched as Bart got into the metallic foil 'icicles' and proceeded to make it snow all across the far end of the cave.

Tim raised a brow high enough to be seen over his mask. "Reliable sources?"

"Superman and Batman," Kon replied absently, as he exercised his TTK to make sure he and Tim didn't get covered in impromptu 'blizzard.' At Robin's stunned look, he continued, "They both agree that there's no way Flash wouldn't have gotten himself in over his head in trouble before now if there wasn't some sort of higher power looking after people who 'lacked the ability to reason.'"

Tim snorted. "You were quoting Batman there, weren't you?"

Kon nodded, mouth set in a wry twist of lips.

"But back to the original topic – what are we going to do about Bart?" Tim asked. Only those who knew him well would be able to detect the anxiety in his voice. Bart was about as far from being inherently malicious as it was possible to be, but the accidental havoc he'd cause so far that morning – in just an **hour** – was definitely worrisome.

"Wait for his sugar high to wear off?" Kon offered. It was the only thing he could think of other than making Bart chug down a couple of gallons of milk to let the casein soak up the caffeine in all that coffee – and Bart had already downed two and half gallons with his three boxes of (sugar-frosted) cereal.

"I was actually thinking more of all the food that we're having at the party this afternoon," Tim replied. "Cookies, cakes, pies, peanut butter balls, fudge, brownies, fudge brownies… Cassie, Cissie, and Suzie went on a baking spree this past week. With that much sugar on top of what he's already had…" Tim shook his head, unable to find words in his (admittedly large) vocabulary to cover the magnitude of horrendousness that was a speedster on a sugar high.

Kon blanched, going almost as white as the fake snow that Bart was spraying all over the walls at Mach 3. "Dude, that's…" He shuddered. "I can't think of the words to describe how bad this could get. I don't even want to **think** about Bart getting worse than he is right now."

A loud crash from the far end of the cave punctuated Kon's statement. "Sorry!" Bart yelled, before sipping off elsewhere.

"What are we going to do, Rob?" Kon asked beseechingly.

It was tough being the leader. Not only did you have to deal with team members who wouldn't follow orders in battle, or who fought with each other when they should have been fighting the bad guys – and let's not even get into what a mess it was trying to have team training exercises when no one's powers synched up – but you also had to come up with contingency plan upon contingency plan **just in case**, and people relied on you for **everything**.

Tim cudgeled his brain and finally came up with an admittedly simple idea. But Tim was a big believer in Occam's Razor – at least where Bart was concerned – and the simplicity of his plan was what would enable him and Kon to pull it off. "If we find out what kind of desserts Bart likes best, and eat most of them ourselves before he gets a hold of them, we should be able to keep him from getting too bad."

Kon brightened. "We'll probably have to hide some of it – I skipped breakfast for the sole purpose of being able to stuff myself on Aun– er, the apple pie that Superman donated – I don't think the two of us will be able to eat most of it. But this could totally work."

Nodding, Tim said, "That's an even better idea. Keep Bart from eating too much, but also too fast, and hopefully his metabolism will work it off enough to keep him from getting worse."

Kon nodded, then turned and called, "Hey, Bart! C'mere for a sec."

Barely were the words out of his mouth before Bart stood there, practically buzzing – and definitely vibrating – with energy, and blinking at them so fast only someone looking closely would have seen that his eyelids were, in fact, moving. "Yeah?"

"We were just wondering what your favorite holiday treats were," Tim supplied, speeding up his own speech so as to try and hold onto Bart's (admittedly short) attention span.

Bart didn't even appear to think about it – which probably meant he'd spent seven minutes of subjective time pondering his answer. "Well, I really like anything with coconut in it, and chocolate is really good, oh! And nuts, too, especially peanut brittle, but…fruitcake is my favorite," Bart said in a rush before running off towards the kitchen, presumably hungry once more after all the talk of food.

Tim and Kon exchanged glances dripping with denial, disbelief, and shock. For some reason unknown to mortal man, woman, or Martian, fruitcake was considered a traditional seasonal food, that everyone made, despite the fact that no one – except Bart, apparently – liked it. Their plan suddenly seemed to have a serious flaw in it.

"There's a full cup of sugar in eight ounces of fruitcake," Tim intoned, voice filled with dread. "I overheard Cassie mentioning it to Cissie when they were talking about the four loaves they made to use up the rest of the bag. And Snapper and Ray are bringing another two loaves each."

"Superman donated all the fruitcake he'd received to our party – which is about thirteen loaves," Kon replied, voice equally as infused with trepidation.

Twenty-one loaves of fruitcake, filled with twenty-one cups of sugar. Which, apparently, none of them but Bart would dare to eat.

"We're doomed," they said in unison.

* * *

THE END


End file.
